Behavioural Advertising Fundamentals

Have you ever seen adverts online that are either so totally relevant to what you’re into, or perhaps related to something you’ve recently been looking for online?

Well, the chances are you’re being shown an advert based on your online profile or browsing behaviour.

‘Behavioral Targeting’ refers to a form of online display advertising via website publishers and advertisers which allows them to increase the effectiveness of their media campaigns through the data capture generated by the behaviour of page visitors.

Put simply, when a user visits a web site a profile of that ‘person’ is created. It is anonymous i.e. no personal data is collected, but it is possible to build a picture of pages visited, dwell time on each page, links clicked on, searches made and products interacted with. Behavioral data can then be used on its own or can be added to other targeting factors such as geography, demographic or context of a web page content to identify the most effective audience for advertisements.

Advertisers can then use this data to display campaign creative on a purely behavioural model, to re-target users of a site who have already demonstrated interaction with a product, or based on the context of a page.

Examples of this in the real world might be to:

Target other users that look like shoppers who have previously bought the new England rugby kit from the website

Retarget users who have added the latest One Direction CD to their carts, but who have not checked out

Target readers of a cruise blog with creative advertising the launch of a new ship

You can see from this therefore that the advertising will not only be more efficient as it targets ‘lookalike’ consumers in the most relevant environments to their online behaviour, but it is also more cost effective as the media is not being sold at a premium on a specified placement basis.